A Raga Renaissance Flowers in Brooklyn

From left, Shiva Ghoshal, Arun Ramamurthy, Jay Gandhi and David Ellenbogen of Brooklyn Raga Massive jamming at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.CreditLoren Wohl for The New York Times

By Vivien Schweitzer

March 24, 2016

The jeweled raiment and serene kohl-rimmed eyes of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music and the arts, were projected on a screen behind the stage one recent evening at Pioneer Works, the exhibition and performance space in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

With an ensemble that blended Western instruments and traditional Indian ones, the tabla and sarod, two vocalists — Roopa Mahadevan, wearing a glittery silver sari, and Haleh Kilmer, in dark jeans and boots — sang selections including a tribute to the goddess rendered by Ms. Mahadevan in the haunting melismatic style of southern India. The evening celebrated Indian female cultural figures as well as the female members of the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a dynamic nonprofit collaborative formed in 2012 with a mission to expose new audiences to Indian classical music.

Such weekly events, held in spaces around the city, highlight different elements of the raga, the backbone of Indian music, and conclude with lively late-night jam sessions in which any musician who observes the house rules is welcome to participate. The Massive’s free-floating operations are a vital part of a flowering of Indian music in New York.

On April 6, the collective will offer a birthday tribute to Ravi Shankar, the influential sitar player who collaborated with Western musicians including the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. Mr. Shankar’s impact led The New York Times in 1966 to declare that the raga was “becoming a rage in America,” although it deemed it a “curious fad.” The Massive refers to its current contemporary movement as a raga renaissance.

Yet according to Par Neiburger, the artistic director of the World Music Institute, the Massive is unusual in that, in contrast to the top-down traditionalist approach of most Indian musical organizations, with fierce loyalty to individual teachers and a strict guru-disciple hierarchy, its structure is free-form and democratic.

“There is a lot of improvisation in Indian classical music,” Mr. Neiburger said. “But the basic forms lend themselves to a tradition that is kept intact and hasn’t really been modernized in any extreme way.”

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Anoushka Shankar, the sitar-playing daughter of the renowned sitarist Ravi Shankar, who plans an American tour in April to promote her new album.CreditSimon Scheuller

Recent events presented by the Massive at Pioneer Works, where the collaborative is in residence until April 27, have included explorations of the Hindustani music of northern India; Indian film and dance; a collaboration with African musicians like the Malian singer Awa Sangho; and a tribute to George Harrison and the Beatles. Coming events include an exploration of Carnatic music, the idiom of southern India, on Tuesday, March 29, and, on April 13, a lineup mixing Cuban rhythms with raga melodies.

The Massive has also explored the influence of Indian music on prominent Western classical composers like Terry Riley, performing his “In C,” a Minimalist work from 1964, last year at the Rubin Museum; a recording on the Northern Spy Records label is due out later this year. In a concert in September at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, it will celebrate the birthday of John Coltrane, who was fascinated by Indian music.

As the central element of Indian music, the raga originated with the ancient Vedic hymns sung in Hindu temples and is intended to create a trancelike spiritual mood. (The word, derived from Sanskrit, translates as “passion” or “color.”) It is composed from scales with ascending and descending patterns that form a melodic framework for improvisation and is associated with seasons, moods and events. Ragas open with an introspective prelude called the alap (performed without percussion) that evolves into a rhythmically invigorating section with percussion that often features virtuoso solo segments.

Ragas are largely monophonic, incorporating drones created by instruments like the tanpura, a long-necked plucked string instrument.

A spellbinding concert presented in February at the 92nd Street Y by the World Music Institute illuminated the Carnatic genre at its most sublime. The violinist L. Subramaniam (whose father, V. Lakshminarayana, expanded the role of the violin in the Carnatic tradition from background to solo instrument) joined his son, Ambi Subramaniam, also a violinist, for a mesmerizing performance.

Gentle wisps of melody shared by the two men slowly unfolded over a drone before morphing into a flurry of imaginatively ornamented, virtuosic riffs. When they were joined by two percussionists (Mahesh Krishnamurthy on the mridangam and Ravi Balasubramanian on the ghatam), the music reached ecstatic heights.

Anoushka Shankar, the daughter of Mr. Shankar and a sitar player who both performs classical Indian music and a fusion incorporating other influences, said in an interview that the traditional music in its pure form is struggling in India, where Bollywood and fusion music promoted by the Indian television series “Coke Studio @ MTV,” are popular. “It’s hard to compete in a short-sound-bite-driven market when a form of music is by nature about a slowly unfolding genre,” said Ms. Shankar, who plans an American tour in April timed to the release of her new album, “Land of Gold.”

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The violinist L. Subramaniam, who performed recently at the 92nd Street Y.

In the United States, Mr. Neiburger of the World Music Institute said, Indian classical music tends not to have “the broad appeal that some other world music genres might have, such as Brazilian music, fado and flamenco.” So the Massive teams up with others eager to attract new American listeners, like the Biryani Boys, a duo consisting of the tabla player David Freeman and the sitar player Mustafa Bhagat who also produce YouTube videos infused with hipster humor and featuring prominent Indian musicians.

On Saturday, April 2, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Yorkers will have the chance to hear some of India’s most prominent musicians. Amjad Ali Khan will perform with his sons, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan, the seventh generation of a family of musicians who play the sarod, a long-necked lute prominent in classical northern Indian music.

Many of the Massive members perform Indian classical music in its pure form as well as experimenting with various fusions. An afternoon performance at the Met this month by the sitar player Neel Murgai and the tabla musician Sameer Gupta proved riveting, the soulful alap building in intensity to the colorful fast section called the jhalla.

In a contemporary music scene characterized above all by crossing and blurring genres, it’s possible to find all kinds of collaborations. Mr. Gupta and Mr. Murgai also perform with the violinists Arun Ramamurthy and Trina Basu, both trained in the Carnatic tradition, and the Western-trained cellist Marika Hughes as the Neel Murgai Ensemble. It performs what it describes as “raga chamber jazz,” a blend of Indian forms with everything from Tuvan throat singing to Roma tunes.

Ms. Basu also plays with the cellist Amali Premawardhana, the bassist Perry Wortman and the tabla player Roshni Samlal in the ensemble Karavika, which specializes in a soulful blend of classical and folk traditions from the United States and India.

The Massive members are proud of their open-minded outlook. “New forms are being created that are indigenous to Brooklyn,” Mr. Murgai said. As for the collective’s future goals, Mr. Gupta points out in a lighthearted Massive video that Pioneer Works is not far from the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day the statue won’t have a book and a torch but will have a sitar and a tabla.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Raga Renaissance Flowers in Brooklyn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe